In this article

What's New in the Visual Basic Language

11/16/2012

2 minutes to read

In this article

Visual Basic 2008 introduces new language features, including local type inference, object initializers, anonymous types, and extension methods. These features serve as support for an important new feature, Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), but they are also useful individually.

This topic introduces the new features and provides links to additional information about them.

The anonymous types feature enables you to create instances of a new data type without first writing the definition of the class. Instead, the compiler creates the data type definition based on the properties you specify when you declare the instance.

Partial methods enable developers to insert custom logic into code. A partial method is defined in a partial class, and any developer who uses the class can specify the desired behavior for the method.

You can add a ? modifier to a type name or a variable to specify the nullable version of the type. A nullable value type can have the value Nothing in addition to the values of the non-nullable version of the type.